The Grand Babylon Hotel by Arnold Bennett (good story books to read txt) 📕

“If what, Prince?”

“If you would deign to accept my hand.”

“Am I, then, rich enough?”

“Nella!” He bent down to her.

Then there was a crash of breaking glass. Aribert went to the window and opened it. In the starlit gloom he could see that a ladder had been raised against the back of the house. He thought he heard footsteps at the end of the garden.

“It was Jules,” he exclaimed to Nella, and without another word rushed upstairs to the attic. The attic was empty. Miss Spencer had mysteriously vanished.

The Royal apartments at the Grand Babylon are famous in the world of hotels, and indeed elsewhere, as being, in their own way, unsurpassed. Some of the palaces of Germany, and in particular those of the mad Ludwig of Bavaria, may possess rooms and saloons which outshine them in gorgeous luxury and the mere wild fairy-like extravagance of wealth; but there is nothing, anywhere, even on Eighth Avenue, New York, which can fairly be called more complete, more perfect, more enticing, or⁠—not least important⁠—more comfortable.

The suite consists of six chambers⁠—the anteroom, the saloon or audience chamber, the dining-room, the yellow drawing-room (where Royalty receives its friends), the library, and the State bedroom⁠—to the last of which we have already been introduced. The most important and most impressive of these is, of course, the audience chamber, an apartment fifty feet long by forty feet broad, with a superb outlook over the Thames, the Shot Tower, and the higher signals of the South-Western Railway. The decoration of this room is mainly in the German taste, since four out of every six of its Royal occupants are of Teutonic blood; but its chief glory is its French ceiling, a masterpiece by Fragonard, taken bodily from a certain famous palace on the Loire. The walls are of panelled oak, with an eight-foot dado of Arras cloth imitated from unique Continental examples. The carpet, woven in one piece, is an antique specimen of the finest Turkish work, and it was obtained, a bargain, by Félix Babylon, from an impecunious Romanian Prince. The silver candelabra, now fitted with electric light, came from the Rhine, and each had a separate history. The Royal chair⁠—it is not etiquette to call it a throne, though it amounts to a throne⁠—was looted by Napoleon from an Austrian city, and bought by Félix Babylon at the sale of a French collector. At each corner of the room stands a gigantic grotesque vase of German faïence of the sixteenth century. These were presented to Félix Babylon by William the First of Germany, upon the conclusion of his first incognito visit to London in connection with the French trouble of 1875.

There is only one picture in the audience chamber. It is a portrait of the luckless but noble Dom Pedro, Emperor of the Brazils. Given to Félix Babylon by Dom Pedro himself, it hangs there solitary and sublime as a reminder to Kings and Princes that Empires may pass away and greatness fall. A certain Prince who was occupying the suite during the Jubilee of 1887⁠—when the Grand Babylon had seven persons of Royal blood under its roof⁠—sent a curt message to Félix that the portrait must be removed. Félix respectfully declined to remove it, and the Prince left for another hotel, where he was robbed of two thousand pounds’ worth of jewellery. The Royal audience chamber of the Grand Babylon, if people only knew it, is one of the sights of London, but it is never shown, and if you ask the hotel servants about its wonders they will tell you only foolish facts concerning it, as that the Turkey carpet costs fifty pounds to clean, and that one of the great vases is cracked across the pedestal, owing to the rough treatment accorded to it during a riotous game of Blind Man’s Buff, played one night by four young Princesses, a Balkan King, and his aides-de-camp.

In one of the window recesses of this magnificent apartment, on a certain afternoon in late July, stood Prince Aribert of Posen. He was faultlessly dressed in the conventional frock-coat of English civilization, with a gardenia in his buttonhole, and the indispensable crease down the front of the trousers. He seemed to be fairly amused, and also to expect someone, for at frequent intervals he looked rapidly over his shoulder in the direction of the door behind the Royal chair. At last a little wizened, stooping old man, with a distinctly German cast of countenance, appeared through the door, and laid some papers on a small table by the side of the chair.

“Ah, Hans, my old friend!” said Aribert, approaching the old man. “I must have a little talk with you about one or two matters. How do you find His Royal Highness?”

The old man saluted, military fashion. “Not very well, your Highness,” he answered. “I’ve been valet to your Highness’s nephew since his majority, and I was valet to his Royal father before him, but I never saw⁠—” He stopped, and threw up his wrinkled hands deprecatingly.

“You never saw what?” Aribert smiled affectionately on the old fellow. You could perceive that these two, so sharply differentiated in rank, had been intimate in the past, and would be intimate again.

“Do you know, my Prince,” said the old man, “that we are to receive the financier, Sampson Levi⁠—is that his name?⁠—in the audience chamber? Surely, if I may humbly suggest, the library would have been good enough for a financier?”

“One would have thought so,” agreed Prince Aribert, “but perhaps your master has a special reason. Tell me,” he went on, changing the subject quickly, “how came it that you left the Prince, my nephew, at Ostend, and returned to Posen?”

“His orders, Prince,” and old Hans, who had had a wide experience of Royal whims and knew half the secrets of the Courts of Europe, gave Aribert a look which might have meant anything. “He sent me back